Contraceptive Mandate Forces Franciscan U. To Drop Health Insurance

Apparently, that “compromise” didn’t assuage the university, and we can probably expect many more to follow suit (depending on who wins the election)

(Life News) Franciscan University appears to be the first casualty of the new Obama HHS mandate that requires Catholic colleges, groups and businesses to pay for drugs that may cause abortions and birth control for their employees.

Although President Barack Obama declared “If you like your health care coverage you can keep it,” when it came to passing Obamacare, a Catholic college in Ohio has determined it will no longer offer a student health insurance plan.

“The Obama Administration has mandated that all health insurance plans must cover “women’s health services” including contraception, sterilization, and abortion-causing medications as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA),” the university says in a new post on its website. “Up to this time, Franciscan University has specifically excluded these services and products from its student health insurance policy, and we will not participate in a plan that requires us to violate the consistent teachings of the Catholic Church on the sacredness of human life.”

“Additionally, the PPACA increased the mandated maximum coverage amount for student policies to $100,000 for the 2012-13 school year, which would effectively double your premium cost for the policy in fall 2012, with the expectation of further increases in the future,” FUS continues.

“Due to these changes in regulation by the federal government, beginning with the 2012-13 school year, the University 1) will no longer require that all full-time undergraduate students carry health insurance, 2) will no longer offer a student health insurance plan, and 3) will no longer bill those not covered under a parent/guardian plan or personal plan for student health insurance,” the college said.

This is a direct result of Obamacare, a monstrous piece of legislation that went well beyond the original intent, which was simply to make sure that the 30-45 million Americans without health insurance had access to it, a worthy cause. However, we ended up with this pig of a bill that the majority of Americans hate and involves itself way too much with American’s health insurance and care, driving up costs and incentivizing organizations to drop their insurance. How, exactly, does it help make sure people have access to insurance by slapping even more mandates on to what must be offered in insurance plans?

But there you have it: thanks to the government’s firm desire to make sure the one or two women left in the country who did not have easy and cheap access to contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization procedures, our 2,500 students will no longer have an insurance plan ready and waiting for them.

The rule was surely meant to pander to women by offering them “free” stuff (women should be insulted that the Obama administration thinks women aren’t capable of paying the small costs for contraceptives themselves) with an election coming up. There was zero reason for the contraceptive mandate. This was micro-managing in the market, and the Law Of Unintended Consequences has turned around and bit Team Obama in the posterior.